Primitive Plus Fixes & New Content May Come Later Than Sooner

Ark's Primitive Plus developer, Ced, took to the blog to explain what is going on with Primitive Plus currently.

Primitive Plus has been out on both PC and the Xbox One for quite some time now. The new additions in this mode has definitely breathed new life into the game giving survivors a completely new learning curve and more possibilities in playing the game. It has not been without faults, however, with many broken items and missing ones as well.

Even with new dinosaurs having been added to the game, many survivors have been frustrated with the lack of saddles required in order to utilize the newly released beasts. Things such as hunting knives provided nothing more than an aesthetic item as it lacked the ability to do what the game intended. Probably most frustrating is the minimal ability of the obsidian pickaxe to properly collect carbon from the volcano. Without carbon many items that require steel ingots are not able to be created or used.

Since the release there has been a few updates and hotfixes deployed to fix some of the issues at hand. Several include the adjustments to prevent the use of poultry to speed up taming times with Quetzals. This is just one of a few fixes, which is sad because have you seen the Allosaurus spawns?

It’s Ced here and I wanted to update you on a few things going on with Primitive+ and a look into what the future holds for this game mode. Over the past few weeks there have been a range of bugs plaguing both PC and XBOX. While some of these existed in the mod version, a bulk of them arise from complications with new updates.

Something important to know about Primitive Plus is that it will always be slightly behind the main content for the game. One of the reasons for this is to separate core ARK issues from those that are specifically related to Primitive Plus. Often when we release updates for main content, there are issues that arise which warrant minor patches to ensure functionality and compatibility.

Adding those items to P+ before they are finalized would result in complications in diagnosing where the issue is stemming from. For this reason, there will always be a minor delay when implementing new content from the game. I don’t expect that (in normal situations) for that delay to span past a week.

In terms of the current state of Primitive Plus – the current focus is to make sure that everything in the game now functions as it’s intended to. Normally there would be more teasers of content coming in the future but I’ve slowed down on the roadmap to focus on squashing any existing bugs. The voice from the community has been heard. You’ve let me know that you want better communication and better testing on patches before release.

@itsr2ghgaming, an active member in the ARK community, has offered his time to be the community manager for Primitive Plus. You can expect to hear from him a lot more as we gather feedback on the existing builds and get ideas for content to add in the future. He will also be reaching out to those who have expressed interest in being on the QA team for Primitive Plus. I’m extremely excited to have him on-board and he brings a wealth of knowledge about the development kit and Primitive Plus. Rest assured that both communication and testing are big concerns.

In addition to communication and testing, I’ve taken efforts to consolidate the current bugs by taking advantage of our internal bug tracker here at SurviveTheArk. A big thanks to Jimmy NoShoes for all the work he’s done maintaining the bug thread in the Primitive Plus forums! I thought I’d take it a step further and put it into the bug tracker system for better visibility. Our QA testers will have access to this system which includes adding bugs and checking on the status of bug fixes.

It is unfortunate that Primitive Plus survivors will have to wait roughly a week or so after each update hits the main game. However, given that the bugs need to be fixed in the main game before deploying it onto Primitive Plus only makes sense, also saves time on the developers side with the ability to tackle one issue at a time rather than multiple that could potentially be more of a headache. I’m with you survivors, I don’t like it, but if it makes for a better Ark I’m okay with it.

It’s an unfortunate thing, however it’s just something on the timetable. Since Primitive Plus is a mod, it doesn’t take high priority. That causes many things to get left behind and delayed till later. Still not ETA on the current versions fixes.